Lifestyle, work-life balance most often associated with burnout

Action Points

Note that this study was published as an abstract and presented at a conference. These data and conclusions should be considered to be preliminary until published in a peer-reviewed journal.

ORLANDO -- Burnout is becoming ubiquitous among clinicians in all specialties and gastroenterologists are no exception, especially those who are younger or female, said American College of Gastroenterology (ACG) President Carol A. Burke, MD.

"Now is the critical time to address burnout in our specialty in order to preserve the future pipeline of gastroenterologists," said Burke during her presentation.

ACG President-Elect Irving M. Pike, MD, who is currently the senior vice president and chief medical officer of John Muir Health in Walnut Creek, California, commented that burnout is problematic and solutions are needed.

"The survey that was done documented something we were already suspicious of. In fact, one of our past presidents, Ronald Vender, originally asked that we begin to look at this closely," Pike told MedPage Today. "What we are finding in medicine, regardless of the specialty, is that this amount of burnout is very common."

Burke and colleagues created a 60-item survey on burnout which included questions on demographics, wellness, and hours at work. It was emailed to 11,080 ACG members in 2014-2015; 1,021 responded with 754 completing all questions. The survey included questions from the Maslach Burnout Inventory.

Respondents' mean age was 54 and most were at least 20 years post-fellowship. A large majority (93.5%) worked full time and 61% were in private practice, with an average of 8 hours per day spent in direct patient care, 3 hours per day in administrative tasks at work, and 2 hours per day of work-related tasks performed at home.

Burke reported that factors related to lifestyle or work-life balance were more often associated with burnout compared with factors related to practice.

Being female, younger age, spending more hours on domestic chores and childcare, and having a spouse who spends more hours at work were significantly linked to burnout. Not surprisingly, spending more hours at home on patient-related work was also a contributing factor.

Work-related factors associated with burnout included skipping meals on at least half of work days, and perceptions that the electronic medical record system was not user-friendly.

"One of the most common causes of burnout seems to be the change from paper charts to electronic medical records as this puts a lot of additional work on the physician that was previously done by others," Pike told MedPage Today.

"We will see whether that factor over time will go down as those who go to medical school will have never had a paper record so it's not something new."

Type of practice, location, and compensation had no impact on levels of burnout, Burke reported.

Other results included that 46% of respondents had thoughts of early retirement, with the leading reasons being reimbursement issues (32%), regulations (21%), and maintenance of certification (16%).

Burke stated that 60% of respondents said they would use resources or strategies to promote professional and personal well-being, career satisfaction, and work-life balance if they were available.

She noted that while reading journal articles and discussing issues with colleagues can be helpful in combatting burnout, there also need to be organizational initiatives to mitigate the issue, including better practice regulation.

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